Blog

On Monday, educational design consulting company PlusUs announced that Friends’ Central School was one of four finalists for their inaugural Desing for Learning Grant. The grant provides six months of the East Falls-based company’s time to design a solution to a project pertaining to instruction, strategy, communications, teacher training or physical learning environments.

Currently, the maker culture is concentrated and centralized in the makerspace. What this grant hopes to achieve is to grow a more distributed maker-culture at FCS by transforming unused or underutilized spaces into Makernooks—mini makerspaces designed to provide tools, materials, and space for teachers and students to engage with making outside of the main makerspace.

The Makernooks will help cultivate a decentralized maker culture that is not bound by the walls of the physical makerspace. This, ultimately, is the goal of maker education: not to merely offer occasional exposure to tools and materials, but to empower students to take an active role in their educational experience.

We are honored to be selected among a diverse pool of compelling applications and look forward to an opportunity to working with PlusUs to further our mission and demonstrate the positive impact design can have on learning.

In this project students “designed” quadratic equations, traced them, laser cut their contours and then hosted a math amusement park for other grades to attend.

Students modeled their roller coasters on their iPads by writing quadratic equations and passing through 3 different apps before sending their designs to the laser cutter. First students wrote 6 parabolic equations in Desmos. Next, they juxtaposed them, took a screenshot, and then opened the screenshot in Notability where they traced and connected the outlines of the parabolas. They then sent their outline through Vectorize It! on its way to the laser cutter.

Two copies of their model were laser cut out of cardboard. Students then assembled them into a frame made out of clear acrylic and plywood spacers and camps.

Students made at least two iterations of the project, measuring and improving their roller coaster on any metric they chose (e.g. the fastest coaster, the slowest while still finishing, the longest, the biggest jump, etc). When the final versions of all of the roller coasters were ready, and each parabola was labeled with its equation (standard form on one side, vertex form on the other), we invited the whole middle school to play with our quadratic roller coasters. Serious fun!